- Northwest Washington Spring (washingtonlandscape.blogspot.com)
Winter in northwest Washington is a bit hard to define. It is a transition between fall and spring with periodic short spells of very cold weather. Some years such as this year there are no cold spells of note. The chances of a cold spell this late are pretty remote. Late Monday the weather shifted from chilly wet to mild and wet. No more 32 to 40 degree days with a mix of rain and snow in the lowlands.
- NGC 7662 (Wikipedia)
NGC 7662 is a planetary nebula located in the northern constellation Andromeda. It is known as the Blue Snowball Nebula, Snowball Nebula, and Caldwell 22. This nebula was discovered October 6, 1784 by the German-born English astronomer William Herschel. In the New General Catalogue it is described as a “magnificent planetary or annular nebula, very bright, pretty small in angular size, round, blue, variable nucleus”. The object has an apparent visual magnitude of 8.3 and spans an angular size of 32″ × 28″. Parallax measurements give a distance estimate of 5,730 ± 340 ly (1,757 ± 103 pc).